Science Magazine has published a thought-provoking article about the use of public DNA databases by the use of law enforcement officials. The introduction to the article by Natalie Ram, Christi J. Guerrini, and Amy L. McGuire states:
“The search of a nonforensic database for law enforcement purposes has caught public attention, with many wondering how common such searches are, whether they are legal, and what consumers can do to protect themselves and their families from prying police eyes. Investigators are already rushing to make similar searches of GEDmatch in other cases, making ethical and legal inquiry into such use urgent.”
The article also considers issues that seem to violate the U.S. Constitution, such as the following:
“Despite the lack of legal protection against law enforcement searches of nonforensic databases, such searches may run counter to core values of American law. The Fourth Amendment is a constitutional commitment to protect fundamental civil rights. Part of that is a commitment to protecting privacy or freedom from government surveillance. Police cannot search a house without suspecting a specific individual of particular acts—even if doing so would enable the police to solve many more crimes. Yet, database searches permit law enforcement to search the genetic data of each database member without any suspicion that a particular member is tied to a particular crime. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has approved suspicionless genetic searches for individuals with diminished expectations of privacy, like those arrested or convicted of crimes (8), ordinary members of the public are different. Familial searches, like those used in the Golden State Killer investigation, are an even further departure from the Supreme Court standard. Certainly, individuals who commit crimes and leave their DNA behind forfeit any expectation of privacy in that DNA. But a usable forensic identification requires two matching parts: a crime scene sample and a database profile that matches it. Suspects identified through familial searches cannot be said to have voluntarily shared their genetic profile in a database of known individuals, even if a genetic relative has.”
You can read the full article by starting at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1078. Once on that site, click on “View Full Text.”
- Life Savings Have Been Stolen from TSB Bank (in the United Kingdom) Accounts
- Facebook Bug Switched as Many as 14 Million Users’ Privacy Settings to ‘Public’
Categories: DNA, Legal Affairs
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Privacy Blog 